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I'm currently working on version 3 of Poplicious.Com. I want to include a community in it, and have bought and set up vBulletin for that purpose, but not opened it yet while I finalise the new site design and the forum templates.

Now on my new design, I'm using a very clever ad management system called AdCycle that uses a mySQL database to track and deliver ads. The ads are put into the pages by calling the script in an SSI call. All the pages of my site have the .shtml extension, as my the SSI calls won't work without this extension.

The thing is, I want to run some small ads on my forums, but of course because all the vBulletin pages have the .php extension they're not recognising the server side includes.

Is there another way to deliver the ads? I've heard of iframes but i'm a little dubious cos i'd heard they're not fully cross browser compatible. If a browser doesn't support them, does it just ignore the tag or go horribly wrong? Is changing vBulletin's default file extension possible? I don't know PHP so if it's complicated i'll not try it.

You need to read the vBulletin manual on how to include SSI in your vbulletin pages. As of right now you can only parse the header and footer templates and it is kind of tricky. You can't just include code in the templates or the system can break.

You can, optionally, set the header and/or footer to be parsed as PHP code. Doing this will allow you to put support for webadverts or other adservers into the header. For calling perl scripts, you will want to use this function:

I'd considered that Keith. The ads i'm running currently are cj.com ads but the reason I want to use adcycle for my ad management is that it's far superior in terms of delivery and tracking. Also, later on if I get chance to sell or trade advertising on my forums, I'll need it's ability to track impressions and click-thru ratios. Something you can't do with cj.com. I think for now i'll leave the ads off, or run them directly from cj.com, at least until I get it working with the script.

Makes perfect sense to me how it works by letting the script generate the image and link location. Now for some strange reason, it's displaying / rotating the banners with no problems, but it's not letting you click on them. When you hover the mouse over the banner it doesn't pick up the hyperlink either, so i'm guessing there's a problem with the link itself, but I can't immediatley see what it is. Is it because i'm calling a .cgi script from a .php page?